According to 2016 data gathered by Media Insight Project, a partnership between Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute, only 6 percent of Americans have great confidence in the media.

The report stated: “Over the last two decades, research shows the public has grown increasingly skeptical of the news industry.” It also found that at least two-thirds of consumers “value broad concepts of trust like fairness, balance, accuracy and completeness.”

I am here to defend most of Orange County’s media professionals and say they do an excellent job. Unfortunately, a few find it irresistible to print whatever is dangled in front of them, if it promotes their narrative that cops and prosecutors are bad.

The public deserves to know the truth, and yet the media continually print one-sided stories that are, sadly, jam-packed with inaccuracies. We are here to tell the other side of the story — the truth that has been conveniently left out.

Let’s begin with addressing the Orange County Register’s coverage of the infamous case of People v. Daniel Wozniak. In 2016, Wozniak was sentenced to the death penalty for brutally murdering two young people to pay for his wedding.

For six years, the public defender attacked the integrity of the trial judge, Costa Mesa police, an MSNBC producer, Senior District Attorney Matt Murphy who prosecuted the case, and dozens of other police and prosecutors. The Register would gleefully print wholesale the allegations, but it would not cover the matter if the judge ruled against the public defender.

It’s not “investigative reporting” to just reprint allegations made in motions. That simply takes a scanner.

A properly investigated story on Wozniak would have revealed that the public defender recklessly filed these motions with little or no due diligence; the public defender submitted exhibits containing unredacted personal information, including social security numbers of witnesses and victims of violent crimes, in violation of law; the public defender engaged in a heated confrontation with grieving family members regarding the death penalty; and that the original judge became so fed up with the public defender’s antics that he recused himself from the case, observing, “You incite the prosecutor, who merely responds.”

On May 11, 2017, the Register published an article entitled, “Informant use questioned in another murder trial” with the subhead “Prosecutor accused of misleading jury” on A1 with a color photo of prosecutor Matt Murphy, which was essentially a shameful reprint of the public defender’s motion and a recap of the Register’s coverage on informants on other cases.

On June 2, 2017, a Register reporter was present during the hearing where afterwards even the public defender admitted the court absolved the prosecutor of all wrongdoing.

The court ruled:

“The trouble with the defendant’s argument is that, despite his continuing claims, this was not an informant case.”

“The court found no legal basis for the public defender’s request to preserve hundreds of thousands of documents going back 36 years, long before the Wozniak case, and some documents before Mr. Wozniak was even born!”

“As this court sees it, there is no evidence of misconduct on the part of Mr. Murphy in either the Deleon or Wozniak trials.”

But it took a full five days to print the story on B1 — not A1 — of the written ruling made by the judge, and only after the Register was shamed into doing so by the OCDA.

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